February 15, 2012

How about an international award for hypocrisy?

Alan Hart

Arising out the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, the Nobel Prize is universally recognized as the most prestigious award in the fields of peace-making, economics, chemistry, physics, medicine and literature. How about an international award - without the gold medal, the diploma and the money -a for hypocrisy?

Such an award could be called the Lebon
Prize (reversing Nobel).

If there was such an award, the
statements of European and American leaders in the immediate aftermath of
Russia and China’s veto of the Security Council resolution to end the killing
in Syria suggest two most obvious nominees for it.

One is William Hague, Britain’s Foreign
Secretary.

In the House of Commons he pronounced
Bashar al-Assad’s regime to be “doomed” because there is “no way it can recover
its credibility.” That may very well be the case in the long term, but in my
view that Hague statement was somewhat naive at the time he made it. For its
short to mid-term survival at the time of writing, and unless visiting Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is seeking to engineer Bashar al-Assad’s
departure from office in a face-saving way that will protect Russia’s
interests, the Syrian regime doesn’t need credibility in the outside world. It
needs only enough weapons and the will to go on killing its own people. (That
said there can be no doubt that Bashar al-Assad and/or his Alawite generals
took the Russian and Chinese vetoes as a green light to escalate the killing.
Also to be noted is that Bashar al-Assad was not the only Arab leader to draw a
particular conclusion from Mubarak’s downfall. “If our people take to the
streets demanding regime change, shoot them!”)

But the particular Hague statement that
prompts my suggestion that he be nominated for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy was
this one. By exercising their veto “Russia and China have placed themselves on
the wrong side of Arab and international opinion.”

The obvious implication is that it’s not
good politics and policy to be on the wrong side of that opinion. Really? Then
how do we explain the fact that all the governments of the Western world, led
by America, are on the wrong side of it because of their support for the Zionist
state of Israel right or wrong - unending occupation, on-going ethnic cleansing
and all? There is a one-word answer. Hypocrisy.

The second most obvious nominee for a
Lebon Prize for hypocrisy is Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. In
condemning the Russian and Chinese vetoes, she said, “For months this Council
has been held hostage by a couple of members.”

Given that for the Security Council has
been held hostage for decades by American vetoes to protect Israel from being
called to account for its crimes, that Rice statement is - what I can say
without resorting to use of the “F” word? - hypocrisy most naked and taken to
its highest level

No doubt readers will have other
suggestions, probably many, for nominations for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy.

Footnote

Hague
also condemned China and Russia for “betraying the Syrian people”. It
apparently doesn’t matter that the British and all other Western governments
have been betraying the Palestinians for decades. There really is no end and no
limit to the hypocrisy.